CMNC

March 2020

Harriet Spiegel

This spring Newsletter is, alas, missing one regular feature: a report on our winter workshop, because for the first time in over 30years, we had to cancel a workshop. We tried valiantly to work out a financial arrangement with SFSU, but finally had to accept that the sums that they needed, more than double our earlier amount, were not possible for us. No one is sadder than your Board about this, for we have had many years of wonderful workshops at SFSU and a long, productive, and treasured relationship with SFSU’s fabulous resident string quartet. We hope that the Alexander Quartet members can continue to be CMNC coaches and friends.

But when one door closes, others open. You can read the CMNC president’s article in this newsletter and learn about exciting progress we are making in our search for new sites for our Fall and Winter workshops. We hope that losing SFSU will become just a small hiccup and that our new sites will provide more opportunities for even greater chamber music times.

This edition of The Chamber Musician introduces a new column: Note-Worthy. Members are invited to submit any chamber music related article that they would like to share. Hats off to Karen Wright and Corey Weinstein for the first entries in this column! Also in this edition you will learn why you should love the bass clarinet, featured in our coaches’ concert, and why we have therefore dedicated this workshop to the bass clarinet as we offer a special welcome to all bass clarinet players. We also acknowledge that we live in an age of uncertainty. We thought we had paid our uncertainty dues with our long and unsuccessful negotiations with SFSU. But now we share broader uncertainties with the world-wide spread of the COVID virus. We are optimistically planning for our spring workshop at our beloved College of Marin, but we remain watchful and cautious.

January 2020

Elizabeth Morrison

This issue of the Chamber Musician has been written and edited in Eureka, five hours north on Highway 101 from the San Francisco Bay Area, but still beneath the Chamber Musicians of Northern California umbrella. Now that 13% of the Board of Directors (Sue Fowle and I) live up here, it’s officially an outpost of CMNC. Sue has written an article describing the musical opportunities behind the Redwood Curtain. In addition, it’s beautiful here, there are redwoods and plenty of water, parking is a cinch, and your real estate dollar goes a lot farther, probably, than where you live now. Feel like moving yet?

But our remoteness from the Bay Area makes it especially disappointing that CMNC has had to cancel one of our workshops, for the first time in 30 years. I would have attended the workshop in February and caught up with everyone! The Board has asked me to share in this column why we had to cancel, and what we are doing to get back to three workshops a year.

As you know, CMNC has been cordially welcomed to San Francisco State as an OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) class since 2016. Our OLLI status allowed us to pay an affordable facilities fee, and this made our workshop financially viable.

In April of 2019 we were notified of a change in OLLI leadership, and soon after, CMNC Board members began discussions with the new director. Coming in with a fresh eye, she wondered whether in fact CMNC was a good fit as an OLLI class. Both CMNC and OLLI had hoped there would be synergy–that CMNC workshop attendees would sign up for other OLLI classes, and that OLLI members would attend our chamber music workshops. Neither turned out to be the case. OLLI@SFSU did not draw many attendees from CMNC’s far-flung membership, and our requirement that workshop attendees play instruments made it difficult for OLLI members to join us at our weekends.

After lengthy deliberation, the decision was made that CMNC would no longer be an OLLI class, and CMNC President Alan Kingsley began investigating whether we might continue as a class under the Department of Music. By this time we were well into our planning for the fall workshop, which had long been scheduled for October 2019. Since we were so close to our deadline, SFSU kindly allowed us to hold one last workshop under OLLI, with the understanding we would need to work out something different for February 2020.

Meanwhile, a shift in SFSU’s policies, coming from farther up the hierarchy, led to a dramatic increase in what we would be charged to use the rooms and pianos in the Creative Arts and Humanities buildings. The fee, we were told, would jump from about $5,000 to $20,000, and would apply whether we were an OLLI class, a music department class, or any other possible arrangement we might come up with. This increase was more than we could handle. We could imagine absorbing a moderate fee increase by raising our fees a bit and using some of our Challenge funds, but an increase of this level was beyond us. We had some possibilities for other venues, but none secure enough for a workshop just a few months in the future. So, with great reluctance, we cancelled our February workshop.

Board members are actively looking at alternative venues. We have been missing an East Bay venue since we left Mills College, and would like to have at least one and perhaps two workshops in Oakland, Berkeley or Hayward. We know there is no perfect venue, but we are hopeful we can find places to hold workshops that will work well enough for us to enjoy our favorite pastime together once again.

It feels very strange to be into January and not busy planning a workshop! Our next workshop will be May 30-31, 2020, at College of Marin, Kentfield. We will have the “Next Workshop” column in the spring issue of The Chamber Musician, when we will have planned more of the details. We do know that the performing coaches will be the bass clarinet duo Sqwonk, made up of Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russel. Jeff was a much-appreciated coach at our June 2015 workshop, along with Jeffrey Sykes and Jean-Michel Fonteneau. Sqwonk’s website explains that they are “devoted to exploring the full expressive range of the bass clarinet, from deep resonances to raucous wails.” This is clearly not to be missed, and we look forward to seeing them, and you, in May.

September 2019

Elizabeth Morrison

Fall always feels like a time of new beginning, and this issue brings you many. CMNC has two new officers: Alan Kingsley has become president, and Diane Hie, a founding board member from 1989 to 1991, has re-joined the board and is taking over Alan’s former position as treasurer. Happily, Carolyn Lowenthal and Harriet Spiegel will stay on as vice president and corporate secretary, respectively. We have a brand new board member, pianist Suzanne Kirk, who will be our recording secretary, our liaison with San Francisco State, and will assist as coach coordinator. Maria Reeves has returned to the board after a brief hiatus. We are very glad to have her back.

In the announcement of our next workshop, October 5-6 at San Francisco State, you will find a new format for the weekend, incorporating the Morrison Artist Concert Series’ opening concert, with our friends the Alexander String Quartet, into our workshop schedule. Actually, the format is not totally new: we followed this schedule at our February, 2013 workshop, when we were coached by the Juilliard String Quartet.

In this issue we also look to the past for the origin story of a quartet new to the CMNC library, written in 1881 and finally published in 2017. The work is the C Minor String Quartet by Dame Ethel Smyth. The article finds clues to the 136-year delay in encounters between Smyth and Johannes Brahms. Everything old is new again!

You’ll also find our customary report on our June workshop at College of Marin. If you attended and filled out an evaluation form, you will have seen a question about The Chamber Musician. We had been wondering whether CMNC members read and enjoy it, and were happy to learn that many of you do. So we will continue publishing it three times a year, as we have all the way from the beginning of CMNC 30 years ago. But we could use some help. We are down to two editors, and we would really like to have three, or even more. Do you enjoy writing and have ideas about what would be of interest to an appreciative group of chamber musicians? Let us know. We will be happy to guide you through the process, and would love to hear what’s on your mind.

April 2019

Harriet Spiegel

I am delighted to share this celebratory issue of our newsletter. A highlight is a tribute to Elizabeth Morrison, as well as some of her own memories. She is moving to Eureka after 20 years of service on the Board, during which, she admits, she has missed only one workshop, and that was due to an ice skating accident. Her energy, vision, tact, and patience have been a model of leadership and passion; we wish her well in the next chapter of her most interesting and influential life. And speaking of interesting and inspirational, but in quite a different way, this issue’s It’s Instrumental will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, and reveal what you’ve always wanted to know: How to make a viola from a horse’s skull. So here’s to Spring 2019!

December 2018

Elizabeth Morrison

Our theme for this issue is Composers, the amazing people at the heart of our musical endeavors. It’s exciting to know that they aren’t all dead; indeed, they walk among us! For example, there is Michi Garrison. Michi has written a string quartet called “Chocolate Pie” that results in not just a delightful musical experience, but a delicious treat. Michi’s piece is about chocolate pie, not mousse, and should not to be confused with P.D.Q. Bach’s monumental “Moose” quartet, whose slow movement, Largo alla Fargo, is introduced by the question, “Muss es Sein?” (Is it a moose?), and later answers itself with, “Es Muss Sein!” (It is a moose!)

Then there is CMNC stalwart, oboist, and former Board member Gary Friedman, I have been following his composing career ever since playing his “Eliahu Variations” twenty years ago. Gary in turn introduced me to clarinetist Karl Schmidt, another prolific writer of music. There is also our valued oboist Stardust, whose compositions I have greatly enjoyed playing at Opus Project concerts.

I’m sure there are many more of you in our CMNC community who write music as well as play it. Please let us hear from you. We would love to know what you are doing.

The Composers theme continues into the February workshop, where we will devote the Saturday session to Composers of the Western Hemisphere. Workshop director Bill Horne’s article gives details, and we are very excited about this chance to explore some wonderful music from our library. The library is a tremendous resource for everything we want to do. Its riches owe much to a quest for variety by Bill Horne, Merlyn Doleman, and others of the early Board, as well as to the wide-ranging interests of many current board members and volunteers, and to the expertise of our current libr1arian, Catherine Jennings.

When making assignments for the workshop, it can even be a bit intimidating to find yourself staring at a list of 265 string quartets, 80 piano trios, or 111 woodwind quintets. It can be tempting to fall back on the standards, and no one ever complains about being assigned too much Brahms, but there are so many wonderful composers in this world. Hence, our workshop themes, including our previous Women Composers workshop and this February’s Western Hemisphere theme, both designed to stretch our boundaries.

For another chance to explore the composers around us, I am looking forward to participating in the Left Coast Ensemble’s Intersection Workshop in January and February. The special feature of this workshop is that each group has a new piece composed for them by one of the winners of the Intersection Composition Competition. I’m told I will receive a new string trio by Monica Chew soon. CMNC composers–why not enter the competition next year!

September 2018

Amy Apel

Welcome to the autumn 2018 issue of The Chamber Musician! In this issue, CMNC’s President Elizabeth Morrison provides an update on what the Board of Directors has been doing behind the scenes to continue to produce three chamber music workshops every year. We welcome Yin Yao and Joan Garvin as new members of the CMNC board. And as usual there are reports on our upcoming October workshop at San Francisco State University and our previous workshop at College of Marin.

This issue also reflects on what it means to be amateur musicians and ways we can improve our playing. Horn player and CMNC workshop participant George Gelles shares his experience in the Be Phil Orchestra, an international ensemble of amateur orchestral musicians assembled by the Berlin Philharmonic to work on Brahms’ first symphony under Simon Rattle. Tessa DeCarlo and I discuss the benefits of making and reviewing audio and video recordings of yourself. And we share fond remembrances of pianist Larry Flor, who passed away in May, for his dedication to music.

March 2018

Harriet Spiegel

So many of you have contributed to this edition of The Chamber Musician. In addition to our regular columns and the spring newsletter feature “It’s Instrumental,” you will also find contributions from members celebrating musical connections, from our own domestic chambers to those of new friends around the world, in particular those made through ACMP. Several CMNC members have been involved with ACMP from its inception in 1946. You will read about some early experiences with ACMP as well as some recent ones.

There are now over 2,500 members of ACMP from almost every part of their world, sharing the international language of chamber music. ACMP publishes an annual world-wide directory, so that wherever you are, you can connect with other chamber musicians, and you will read of several such experiences here. ACMP also encourages musicians to stay home and play, offering home coaching grants to bring a coach to you!

ACMP regularly supports CMNC’s workshops with generous financial grants. Several CMNC members have served on their board, and we encourage all CMNC members to join ACMP.

December 2017

Elizabeth Morrison

A Place in the Repertoire

Two years ago, in October 2015 at Mills College, CMNC’s workshop devoted one of its two days to programming music by women composers. Since that memorable day, my interest in music by women has only grown. At subsequent workshops I have played pieces by Grazyna Bacewicz, Reena Esmail, Viteszlava Kapralova, Dora Pejacevic, Marie Dare, and Jennifer Higdon. Lucie Vellère and Elizabeth Maconchy I have played twice. Along with the joy of playing this beautiful music has come surprise that there are so few opportunities to hear music by women in the concert hall.

The useful website Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy reports that of the top 21 orchestras in the US, 14 (including the San Francisco Symphony) did not program a single work by a woman in the 2016-17 season. Five ensembles programmed just one. Only two, the New York Philharmonic and the Baltimore Symphony, programmed more than one. Why are performances of music by women so rare? One often hears statements to the effect that it is only recently that women have been “given the opportunity” to compose, and that this accounts for their underrepresentation on concert programs. With audiences’ strong desire to hear (over and over) works by the great composers of the 18th and 19th century, this is a convenient explanation.

However, it is not true. Women have been composing forever, and there are great works from all eras that could be programmed. The same website has a section devoted to orchestral repertoire, along with links to obtain scores. We could be hearing music by Louise Farrenc, Mel Bonis, Fanny Mendelssohn, Florence Price, Ruth Crawford and many more.

It is undoubtedly true that it has never been easy to be a female composer. But it strikes me that it is not all that easy to be a male composer either, given that it requires talent, musical training, and a way to make a living. Yet somehow both men and women have managed to do it. It turns out that in every era there are have been well-known, respected and performed composers of both, or all, genders. The trick for women is not to compose, or even to succeed as a composer. It is to have your works enter the repertoire and continue to be played when you are no longer around to support them personally.

As an example, consider two English composers, Ethel Smyth (1858- 1944) and Edward Elgar (1857-1934). They are virtual contemporaries, and they were equally famous in their lifetimes. But now? You hear Elgar’s Enigma Variations every time you turn around. Smyth’s Mass in D? Any of her six operas? Her Sleepless Dreams for Choir and Orchestra? Any of her string quartets? Not so much.

Perhaps an even better example came up at the last CMNC workshop. At the Sunday performance sampler I happened to hear both Marie Dare’s Phantasy for Cello Quintet and Benjamin Britten’s Phantasy Quartet for Oboe and Strings. Terrie Baune, who was coaching at the workshop and, as former concertmaster of the much-missed Women’s Philharmonic, is very knowledgeable about women composers, pointed out that both of these pieces won the Cobbett Prize, Britten in 1932 and Dare in 1937. The Cobbett Prize was established in 1905 by Walter Wilson Cobbett, a wealthy British music patron, to promote the composition of what he called Phantasies. An “extremely competent amateur violinist” and owner of a Guadagnini violin, Cobbett more or less invented the modern phantasy, a one-movement piece of chamber music not to exceed 12 minutes in length, based on his theory that most string quartets are too long and are only enjoyed by the players.

I’m sure you have heard of Britten, and chances are you have enjoyed hearing his pieces played in the concert and opera hall. Marie Dare, a Scottish composer who was also well known in her lifetime and who the Saltire Society, a web site on Scottish culture, says wrote “solo and choral vocal works, both secular and liturgical; piano pieces; and a quantity of orchestral and chamber music,” is the most obscure composer I have yet come across in my research. I have not even been able to find a picture of her, though pictures of Britten abound.

There are obviously mechanisms in place by which music by men becomes part of the repertoire, and music by women does not. This needs a lot of unraveling to understand, and social scientists and political theorists are working on it. But it’s clear enough that overcoming the systemic bias, and creating ways to hear the great treasure trove of music by women, will take effort by many institutions and individuals.

There are signs of improvement to be found. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra now has a female composer in residence, Elizabeth Ogonek; I was lucky enough to hear the West Coast premiere of her All These Lighted Things when the CSO played at Zellerbach Hall in October. And if most of the big musical institutions are not stepping up, there is a strong role to be played by smaller, regional orchestras, chamber ensembles and even us amateurs. CMNC is doing its part; my goal when I am workshop director is to assign 20% music by women. And there are many institutions in the Bay Area programming music by women. I was sorry to have missed the Stockton Symphony’s September 23rd concert, which included Rainbow, by Thea Musgrave. But I did hear several wonderful concerts of all female composers.

In March, Berkeley Chamber Performances presented an all-women-composers concert by the woodwind-quintet-plus-piano ensemble Frequency 49. You may remember Frequency 49 as the performing coaches at our College of Marin workshop in May 2016. In varying combinations the musicians played pieces by Valerie Coleman, Grazyna Bacewicz, Jenni Brandon, Vally Weigl, Madeleine Dring and Louise Farrenc. It was amazing, and there was even wine to drink after the concert!

Also in March, Gold Coast Chamber Players gave a marvelous all-women concert in Palo Alto. This thrilling, under-attended program included works by Hildegard von Bingen, Clara Schumann, both Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Jennifer Higdon, Geraldine Mucha, Thea Musgrave, and Amy Beach.

In August the New Millennium Chamber Orchestra presented a program of Reena Esmail’s violin concerto The Blue Room, Cécile Chaminade’s Concertino for flute and orchestra, and a new piece called Mulholland Recollections by Nancy Bloomer Deussen. The concert opened with a fanfare, Courage, by Adrienne Albert, and concluded with Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture in C Major. Both Albert and Deussen were present at the concert. There is a CMNC connection here too: NMCO’s music director, James Friedman, learned of Reena Esmail from CMNC’s programming of her string quartet Ragamala. The violin soloist, Colyn Fischer, and the viola soloist in the Deussen, Donny Lobree, are CMNC members, and the orchestra is rich in CMNC folks as well.

This summer the West Edge Festival, whose fabulously edgy performances, including Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen last year, have entranced me for some time, presented Libby Larsen’s opera Frankenstein. This company uses repurposed venues in Oakland for their summer performances. Check them out–they are a gem.

The Berkeley Symphony, with music director and conductor Joana Carneiro on leave, brought in New Zealand conductor Gemma New for their December concert, and programmed Anna Clyne’s Abstractions and Rene Orth’s Chasing Light. The Prometheus Symphony, in Oakland, received a grant from the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy for their Women Composers Series, and in November played a piece called Toccata for Orchestra by the twentieth-century American composer Louise Talma.

The Bay Area Rainbow Symphony under our friend and CMNC coach Dawn Harms has long been an excellent place to hear music by women. BARS gave us an overture by Elfrida Andrée in March and Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony in October. I was disappointed that I had to miss the October concert, but consoled that I had recently heard the Amy Beach in Eureka when I attended the Eureka Symphony’s premiere of Libby Larsen’s violin concerto. I am almost looking forward to complaints that orchestras are playing too many dead white females.

Attending concerts where music by women is played is fun, and also a great way to encourage programmers to take the risk of forgoing one more Tchaikovsky. I know of several coming up, and there are certainly more. The Mill Valley Chamber Music Society’s January 14, 2018 concert by the Claremont Trio will present Gabriela Lena Frank’s piano trio (Lena Frank, who now lives in Boonville, is an active and inspiring Bay Area presence.) The April 15 Daedalus Quartet concert at Kohl Mansion includes The Space Between by Anna Weesner. BARS has two concerts coming up with women composers: April 28 with June Bonachic’s The Moons of Neptune and June 9th with Elfrida Andrée’s Freitof’s Suite. I would love to see other institutions follow our lead and commit to at least 20% music by women in every season.

Men, it may take an effort of imagination to see how much it means to many women to hear these composers played, especially under women conductors. Orchestra players have become steadily more diverse since blind auditions were introduced in the 70s, and it would be great to see conductors and programs do so as well. Ideally there would be diversity on all fronts, and it has been suggested that CMNC follow its women-themed workshop with other themes–African and African-American, LGBTQ and Latino composers have all been proposed. I like all these ideas. I would also point out that women are part of every group, so by programming women you often pick up a musical twofer. Valerie Coleman is African-American; Teresa Carreño is Latina; Ethel Smyth is LBGTQ. Program women, and diversity follows.

And speaking of diversity, this is a little off the subject but it is so interesting, and Terrie Baune led me to it. In November I went to see the Oakland Ballet’s program “Luna Mexicana” on Dios de Los Muertos, mainly to see a ballet called Chaconne by the Mexican choreographer José Limon. In this piece the stage is held by a single dancer and a single violinist, Terrie in this case, who plays Bach’s incomparable Chaconne. In the program notes I learned that the chaconne actually originated in Mexico! It was a “wild and sensual Mexican dance,” the chacona, brought to Europe by Spanish travelers in the 16th century, where its rhythms inspired Bach. Almost everyone I have told that the chaconne is Mexican in origin has said, “Oh, you mean it’s Spanish,” but no. It is indigenously American, and the thought of pre-Columbian music inspiring Bach is a head-scratcher and a delight. In the absence of proof to the contrary I am going to imagine a woman, a drummer and a dancer, creating the rhythm of the chacona and sharing it through Bach with the world. That’s one way to get played!

August 2017

Amy Apel

As I write this in the late summer, many of us have returned from our immersive summer music workshops and are processing our experiences and settling back into our quotidian lives. I recently returned from two weeks of singing with the Umbrian Serenades in Soria, Spain. I am a fan of seeking out different types of musical experience, and as I was thinking about my time with the Umbrian Serenades, I remembered Elizabeth Morrison’s article “Adventures in the Rhythm Section” from the January 2003 issue of The Chamber Musician, in which she reflected upon the time she spent in the percussion section of the Redwood Symphony. With a nod to Elizabeth’s article, I will be sharing some of my experiences in “Adventures in the Alto Section.”

This issue also features Miriam Blatt’s article on her participation in the Wollongong, Australia chamber music workshop, which is organized somewhat differently than a CMNC workshop. Hilda Hodges also shares her fond memories of violinist Lucy Sloate, who passed away in March.

Starting with this issue, there are two columns that will be occasional features of The Chamber Musician. The first is an update on the CMNC library. The purpose of the CMNC library is to support the assignment of a wide range of musical works at our workshops. Toward that end, librarian Catherine Jennings has been very active in adding new pieces to the library and weeding out pieces that aren’t suitable for assignment at our workshops. The second is a summary of recent CMNC board activity. Being on the CMNC board is a great pleasure! Please let us know if you are interested in joining the board.

April 2017

Harriet Spiegel

Welcome to spring, to the sun, and to our June COM workshop. If this issue has a theme, it is one of time – looking to the past, bringing it to the present, and anticipating the future. Several musicians will look back to when and how they found their life-partner musical instrument. We learn of Peter Lang and Russ Bartoli’s plan to bring Bach’s cantatas to 21st century chamber musicians. And we explore how the National Endowment for the Arts has contributed to our national heritage and how it might enrich our cultural future—or not! Here’s to spring and to new growth!

December 2016

Elizabeth Morrison

Simple Gifts

In the April 2009 issue of The Chamber Musician I wrote with pleasure about the chamber group who performed at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. The four musicians who played Air and Simple Gifts, by John Williams, were not only amazing players, they were also beautifully diverse. There on the platform were Yo-Yo Ma, a Chinese-French-American cellist; Anthony McGill, an African-American clarinetist; Itzhak Perlman, an Israeli-born violinist who gets around on crutches or an Amigo scooter; and Gabriela Montero, a pianist from Venezuela whose gender holds up half the sky. Best of all, the diversity was completely unremarked-upon. They were a chamber group, and that was all that mattered.

Williams has written that he chose the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” famous from its appearance in Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring, because Copland is one of Obama’s favorite classical composers. How thrilled we were to be welcoming a president who has favorite classical composers! If you’d like to hear the performance again you can listen to it here on YouTube. You may cry.

While they were playing, or, to be honest, synching, the hour of noon arrived, at which time, as stipulated by the Constitution, Obama became president. I felt then and now that our community of chamber musicians, through our non-elected representatives Anthony, Itzhak, Gabriela and Yo-Yo, was there when it happened. I have not felt so included at an inauguration since my Texas grandparents, and this is true, were invited to LBJ’s in 1965.

Thinking back on that day, I am reflecting on how much chamber music, and our chamber music community, gives us. There is the pleasure we take in playing, and the less immediate, but very significant, pleasure that comes along with the relationships we create. Playing music together requires a combination of respect for the whole and assertion of the self. A microcosm of dialectics, a chamber group is at once intimate and public, egalitarian and rarified, technical and ineffable. It sets requirements on participation, but as the many adult-onset players among us can testify, it is open to all who care to put in the time. Diversity, when present, is transcended to the point of being irrelevant. And its rewards are far in excess of its carbon footprint. Once you have your instrument, and perhaps a few books of Haydn or Mozart, you are pretty much set for life.

So I am feeling particularly grateful for CMNC and for the bonds we have formed through our workshop over the last 27 years. We have a community that rewards us in so many ways. I hope to see you all in February!

August 2016

Amy Apel

Welcome to another issue of The Chamber Musician! As I was pulling together the content for this issue, it occurred to me that a recurring theme in this collection of articles is leadership.

CMNC’s board recently elected a new roster of officers to lead the organization for the next three years. Elizabeth Morrison is the newly elected president and took over her new duties from outgoing president Bill Horne as of July 2016. In this issue we will hear from Elizabeth about the direction of CMNC as an organization and our ongoing exploration of the chamber works of female composers.

And then there is leadership within a chamber music ensemble. In British English, the first violinist in a string quartet is actually called the leader. However, as many of us have learned from our coaches, leadership is really a shared responsibility. Each member of the group bears responsibility for the cohesion of the ensemble. I know from personal experience what this looks like in string ensembles and will share some of my own reflections about it. I wondered about the experience of leadership by musicians in wind ensembles or ensembles with piano, and so I interviewed Maria Reeves to get her perspective.

December 2015

Amy Apel

The Coaching of the Del Sol String Quartet

I have now received coaching from two members of the Del Sol String Quartet, Kathryn Bates and Rick Shinozaki. Both of these coaching experiences made a big impression on me, so I would like to share some of what I have learned from Kathryn and Rick.

At the May 2015 workshop at the College of Marin, I had the pleasure of being coached by Kathryn Bates in a group working on Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht sextet. Playing sextets is very tricky, as they have a tendency to sound very “thick,” and it is hard to balance melodic material against rhythmic and textural elements. Kathryn urged us to shorten accented notes, so that they could emerge from the texture more effectively.

At an early stage in our rehearsal process, the short notes in the accompaniment voices were irregular, and the hand-offs of these running notes from one voice to another were not very smooth. Both of these problems made it difficult for the melodic voices to know how to align their notes.

Kathryn asked us to determine the smallest rhythmic unit of the passage, or the finest “granularity” of the notes, which could be triplets, 8th notes, 16th notes, etc., depending on the music. We then played the passage with everyone subdividing in 16th notes, while maintaining the color, dynamics and texture of the music. After we were able to play it cleanly with everyone playing 16th notes, we played it a few more times with different single voices playing the subdivisions.

At the end of this exercise, we had all internalized the pulse, and everyone knew how to fit their parts with the others. It also helped us to calibrate our dynamics, as we were able to identify the exact timing of the top of a crescendo. This exercise even helped with intonation, as we all became much more aware of the amount of time available for shifting positions and had less of a tendency to sound jerky or rushed.

Everyone in the group was astonished at the effectiveness of what is, on the face of it, a rather elementary technique. Kathryn assured us that the Del Sol use this technique in their rehearsals, and we felt that if the technique isn’t beneath the Del Sol, then it certainly isn’t beneath us!

Kathryn also noted several other things about rhythmic cohesion in a group:

• When a minority of the voices playing something like soft tremolos that are the basis for the harmony, these can still lead the pulse for the whole group.
• Whenever possible, try to feel the pulse in larger rhythmic units – it is better to feel 2 big beats per measure, rather than in 4 small beats.
• The best musical experiences happen when the whole group is taking responsibility for maintaining the pulse, rather than following the bass line.

At the October 2015 workshop at Mills College, I got to work with Rick Shinozaki for the first time. On the Women Composers Day, my group was playing Marie Dare’s Phantasy Quintet for string quintet (with two cellos). Phantasy is the British term for fantasia, and the phantasy form was in vogue in Britain from about 1905 through the 1920s. A phantasy is a single-movement work written according to the composer’s fancy, containing multiple sections with different emotional characters, and not following a strict formal scheme. Before Rick joined us, we had been able to work out many of our ensemble issues using the rhythmic technique I just described. This meant that Rick was able to work with us on other expressive issues. The two main interpretive issues facing us were finding the emotional character for each section and making the tempo transitions. Our excerpt contained four distinct sections (out of a total of fourteen), with the following markings:

• Andantino in 4/4 time, quarter note = 69
• Piu mosso
• Meno Mosso in 12/8 time, dotted quarter note = 52
• Piu mosso in 12/8 time, dotted quarter note = 60

It was clear that we weren’t going to be able to play as fast as these tempo markings, so we needed to establish our own set of tempi. Rick asked us to play the opening at various speeds until we arrived at one that was comfortable for us. He then set a metronome to that tempo and asked us to conduct a 4/4 beat pattern with the metronome. We did this for what seemed like a long time, but it was probably only three or four minutes. Then, Rick asked us to go around in a circle and take turns saying the names of composers while continuing the 4/4 beat pattern with the metronome. By combining physical and mental processes, the body focuses on the rhythm while the conscious mind is otherwise occupied, and thus the body–and the group–internalizes the rhythm.

While we were working on this exercise, Rick mentioned a video on YouTube in which thirty-two metronomes are all set to the same number of beats per minute. The metronomes are all started at different times, but over the course of about three minutes they all synchronize. The metronomes in the video certainly have all internalized the same tempo!

Once we had firmly internalized our basic rhythm, we began to talk about what “piu mosso” would mean in that context. Rick increased the tempo by one click. Was the new tempo perceptibly faster? No. One more click. Yes, the tempo was perceptibly faster, so it became our new tempo. We repeated this process for the other section.

When coaches and music teachers ask what the music is “trying to say” or what “the feeling of the music” is, I usually feel baffled due to the open-endedness of the question. To help us to talk about the emotional character, Rick handed out a cheat sheet originally created by the violist, chamber musician, and viola teacher Karen Tuttle. Tuttle divided emotion into five basic categories: love, fear, anger, joy, and sadness. (As an aside, at our house we have been talking a lot about the five emotions personified in Disney/Pixar’s recent movie Inside Out. The movie has a slightly different take than Karen Tuttle– instead of love, the movie’s fifth character is Disgust!)

Once we had established the character for each section, it became much easier to talk about the kind of sound that would convey that character. Once we had decided on the kind of sound we wanted to produce, we were able to talk about techniques to produce the desired sound quality, such as bow placement relative to the bridge, bow speed, articulation, or type of vibrato.

The last thing that I want to mention is something that Rick literally pulled out of his bag in master class that afternoon: a ball. The group was having difficulty bringing out some moving notes that were leading up to an important downbeat. Rick used the ball to illustrate that in the cycle of the ball falling and returning to the hand, its speed varies. In the first place, the speed varies depending the amount of impetus with which the ball is thrown and the distance the ball is dropped. The speed also varies within its downward and upward trajectories. The ball accelerates as it drops. This acceleration adds to the upward thrust of the ball, which decelerates as it approaches the hand.

This analogy demonstrates that arriving at the destination at the right time is more important than playing everything perfectly along the way. It would be boring if we played perfectly rhythmically all of the time. This is the essence of rubato, the expressive slowing down and speeding up of the tempo without changing the underlying pulse. And in the words of violinist Karen Balke, the ball analogy “invited me to think bigger, to get outside the isolating doom of perfectionism.”

August 2015

Elizabeth Morrison

Women Composers’ Day at Mills

If you like playing in orchestras as well as in chamber groups, you are in luck here in the Bay area. The CMNC website lists 22 amateur orchestras, including RTSO, the Really Terrible String Orchestra of Berkeley, modeled on the Really Terrible Orchestra of Edinburgh, Scotland, founded by Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. If you prefer one without “terrible” in its name, you might consider the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, known as BARS. Their website says, “Our flagship ensemble consists of over 80 instrumentalists and presents four concert sets per season. Repertory includes works from the baroque to contemporary periods, including LGBTQ and living composers. 74% of members identify as LGBTQ; 47% of members have a bachelor’s degree or higher in music or the performing arts; 46% of members have performed professionally, with an average of 11 years in the field.” At BARS concerts you will see many CMNC friends on stage. Mark Hodgson is co-concertmaster, Russ Bartoli leads the cellos, and highly appreciated coach Dawn Harms conducts. I have enjoyed many BARS concerts, and truly appreciate their leadership in programming diversity.

A case in point was their June 2015 concert, at which they presented a full concert of music composed by women. It was thrilling. They opened with Partita for Piano and Strings, Opus 20, by Vitezlava Kapralova, a brilliant Czech composer and student of Martinu who would surely be more famous if she had not died of tuberculosis in 1940, when she was just 25. The pianist, Sara Davis Buechner, champions the work and played it enthusiastically. I liked it, though as so often with new pieces it would have been nice to have heard it again in the second half, at which time, Dawn assured the audience, we would all have liked it more. Buechner then played Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Opus 7, written when Clara was 14 years old. It is astonishing how seldom this beautiful work is played. The slow movement has an extended cello solo (warmly played by Russ) composed long before Brahms’ second piano concerto, for which it is a clear inspiration. Many in the audience recalled a 1992 recording made by the much missed Women’s Philharmonic of San Francisco, with pianist Angela Cheng, Terrie Baune as concertmaster, Nina Flyer on solo cello, and Joanne Falletta conducting. This recording also includes the first and still only recording of Fanny Mendelssohn's Overture.

The second half of the concert was given over to the Serenade in D Major by our old friend Ethel Smyth, of whom we had almost a festival at the Mills workshop last October, i.e. we programmed a full two of her chamber works. And at this point, as I reveled in the splendid new music I was hearing, an idea was born. It occurred to me that in light of this concert, the pride I had felt when CMNC programmed four works by women at Mills was not quite justified. I began to wonder…what if….?

I am not much interested in being politically correct when it comes to music. Mostly I am a hedonist; perhaps most of us happy amateurs are. We play classical music for the same reason that Mick Jagger plays rock and roll: because we like it. And three of my most gripping musical experiences over the last few years were with Rebecca Clarke’s piano trio (and her amazing song The Seal Man), Clara Schumann’s piano trio, and most recently the String Quartet in E Minor by Ethel Smyth, which I worked on with a preformed group at two CMNC workshops. The trios have shown up regularly on CMNC programs for some time, but the interesting, challenging Smyth quartet was new to most of us, even to our coach at San Francisco State, Sandy Wilson, who has been telling people ever since how amazed and delighted he is to have discovered her. Smyth, as I learned from her memoirs, was a productive and very famous musician in her time. Could there not be many more women like this, and much more music that we would love to play, if we only knew it?

So I began to think seriously whether we could devote a full day of our upcoming Mills workshop to playing music by women. It seemed to me that after 26 years of playing music by (mostly) men, we could afford to spend one day exploring the composers who hold up the other half of the sky. Of course it was not a decision I could make alone. As workshop director the music assignments are my overall responsibility, but the whole board is involved in selecting the music, and I would need their support and even more, their enthusiasm.

Their support was immediate and their enthusiasm all I could have hoped for. I think we were all intrigued to have a theme for the workshop (we started talking about future programs that might focus on American composers, or Russians, or who knows what else). Women composers seemed very natural to start with. Of course the question arose whether we’d have enough music to assign. A chamber music workshop needs many more pieces than the three needed for an orchestra concert. At Mills we usually have 28 groups; even with seven or eight preformed groups (who select their own music) we’d still need 20 excellent pieces, over a variety of ensembles from trios to string quartets, woodwind quintets, works for piano with winds and strings, and possibly one larger work. We turned to the CMNC library and found that we did in fact own 42 pieces by women. A few, such as the Schumann, Clarke and Madeline Dring trios and Amy Beach’s Variations for flute quintet, have been played quite a few times, a few others have been trotted out now and then, and a good number had been bought and never assigned. Not a good use of our library funds! There is even one piece, Travelling Songs for String Quartet, which CMNC commissioned from Gwyneth Walker, and which Terrie Baune and friends premiered at a workshop at Cal State Hayward in 1996. October 2016 will be the twentieth anniversary of that largely forgotten event–and it may not have been played since.

This was promising, so I mentioned the idea to Terrie Baune as I was on my way to Humboldt. There she helped me more than I can say by assigning me a piece by a woman every single day. In the course of the week I performed the Amy Beach flute quintet, a string quartet by Grazyna Bacewicz, Louise Farrenc’s Nonetto, a piano trio by Elfrida Andrée, and an incredible piano quintet by the living Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, the find of the workshop for me. I also read others, including two piano trios by Lili Boulanger and a string quartet by Venezuelan composer Teresa Carreño, and freelanced five or six more piano trios with Carolyn Lowenthal and Bill Horne. It was all good music, and I had the best time at Humboldt I’ve had in years. Terrie told me she hadn’t gone to any heroic effort to find these pieces, either–they were all ones she would have put out anyway, she just shoved them in my direction to help with the CMNC project. I am very grateful to her for this help.

So this is the plan. On Saturday October 3 at Mills, all the assigned music will be by women composers. The Del Sol Quartet, our performing coaches, have happily agreed to play a piece by a woman as well–Del Sol violist Charlton Lee told me they have the largest repertoire of music by women of any group he knows. They are thinking about Ruth Crawford Seeger. There is an opt-out if you’d like one–you can come as a preformed group and select music by a man, because preformed groups as always are free to choose their own music. Of course if you choose to come preformed with a woman composer, so much the better. Depending on how many preformed groups there are, possibly the usual male-female composer ratio at a CMNC weekend will be reversed. We plan no change in the ratio of male and female coaches or participants, by the way. We hope you’ll all come as usual.

We think this is a first, and we hope you will be as interested in it as we are. Between our existing library and some new pieces we have purchased there is wonderful music from all eras, classical, romantic, and modern, and something to please all tastes. Details are in “The Next CMNC Workshop.” As Saturday is a master class day, each of us will get to hear three pieces beside our own, which should be fascinating. On Sunday we will return to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; they and all the genius men composers we love are not about to disappear from our repertoires any time soon. But on Saturday October 3 our B’s will be Beach, Bolz, Bacewicz, Boulanger, Beamish and Bialwa. There is a great trove of music by women waiting for us. Please join us in discovering it!

March 2015

Harriet Spiegel

With this issue we continue what I hope will become a regular spring feature: highlighting stories about our musical instruments. You will find a piece about a rescued old violin, one about a brand new violin that later brings comfort to an old maker, and one about an unusual single-bodied clarinet made in Chile.

Just as I value making new friends and experiencing new music at our workshops, I also look forward to learning about other instruments and their stories. So I hope that many of you will now consider sharing information or stories about your musical instruments. You have a year to think about it. You can send me your submission early and guarantee space in next spring’s newsletter. Pictures, as you see, are most welcome.

Also in this issue your editor has tried to prepare you for summer travel with a brief summary of updates regarding international travel with a musical instrument.

Please be aware that this information may not be reliable even now. While the general information about travel with a musical instrument is fairly straightforward, that pertaining to travel with an instrument that contains an endangered or prohibited item is far from clear. If travelers find this ambiguity stressful, I can assure you it is far more exasperating for buyers and sellers of such instruments. The information provided here is the most reliable I could find at the moment–please don’t count on it and don’t sue me if you find a contrary customs officer. Best wishes!

January 2015

Amy Apel

What we think of as “classical” chamber music was once contemporary music. Some of those early works gradually attained canonical status, and we continue to play those great pieces today. New chamber works continue to be written today at a more rapid pace than ever. I think that there is a common misconception that all contemporary music is “too hard” or “inaccessible.” There are many works that are accessible to adult amateur players. We do not know which of these contemporary pieces will become core repertoire, but the only way to find out is to play them and become advocates for the works we enjoy. I think that it is exciting to take part in this process.

One of the projects I have taken on as a newer member of the CMNC board is looking for contemporary pieces that are accessible to adult amateurs, and can be programmed in our workshops for those who are so inclined. We are fortunate to live in a region that supports many performing groups that feature contemporary music and are active in commissioning new works.

The Del Sol String Quartet and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble have recently begun offering intensive weekend workshops for adult amateurs. These workshops are complementary to CMNC’s workshops, as they have a much more specific focus. Along with a number of other CMNC members, I will be attending Left Coast’s Intersection workshop, and I am sure that others will be attending the Del Sol’s ChamberFest.

I am planning to write an article reviewing contemporary works assigned for these workshops. If you will be participating in one of these workshops, I would very much like to hear from you. What piece were you assigned? For what instruments was it written? How difficult was the piece, both in individual parts and in the ensemble? Did you enjoy playing it? Do you think that the piece would be enjoyable to work on for a full CMNC workshop day?

Until next time, keep your ears open!

August 2014

Elizabeth Morrison

The October 11-12 weekend at Mills College marks CMNC’s 25th anniversary, and our 78th workshop! I rely for this figure on the November 1990 issue of The Chamber Musician, which says, “The eighth Chamber Music Workshop of CMNC will take place at the College of Holy Names in the Oakland hills on Saturday and Sunday, January 26-27, 1991.” We have held three workshops a year every year since, with the single exception of 1993, when the June workshop had to be cancelled. A workshop or two must have taken place before the official founding of CMNC in 1989, but don’t you think we should count them all? It’s so splendid to go into our 25th anniversary weekend with 77 workshops spread out behind us, like a fabulous train embroidered with amethysts, diamonds and pearls. Seventy-seven weekends filled with music and friendship! It makes me happy just thinking about it.

The 25th is the Silver Anniversary, which is not, as I had assumed, an invention of the Hallmark company but a custom with roots in medieval Europe. On a silver wedding anniversary a husband (a rich one, anyway) was supposed to place a silver wreath on his wife’s head, as a mark of respect for having lived with him for 25 years. No silver wreaths at Mills, sorry, but we will have a special present for everyone at the workshop. After all, we’ve lived together for 25 years too, or at least some of us have. Looking at the very first newsletter in my collection, Summer 1989, I see articles by Sonia Tubridy and Debra Fenzel-Alexander, plus one by our late founding president Alex Zuckerman. Within a few more issues I spot current president Bill Horne, founder David Gortner, early newsletter editor Adrienne Casco, and workshop stalwart Joselyn Bartlett. Rheta Goldberg appears in 1992, Randy Paik and Katherine Bukstein in 1993. In 1994 there is an article by Kristy Venstrom describing her decision to take lessons with Paul Yarbrough of the Alexander Quartet. And of course I can’t fail to mention Bob Nesbet, a founding Board member, who will be present in October, and may have been at all 77.

In the five eventful years since our 20th anniversary, CMNC has both changed and stayed the same. Ten board members from 2009 are still aging in place in 2014, while seven current members have joined since then, including two this very summer. We have a new president, Bill Horne, and a new corporate secretary, Alan Kingsley, but the same vice president, Carolyn Lowenthal, and treasurer, Sheri Schultz. Now is a good time to thank Frank Lahorgue, Joffria Whitfield, Ted Rust, Susan Wilson and Lisa Lai, who served on the board during these five years, for their many valued contributions.

Since 2009 we have had six workshops at San Francisco State and three at College of Marin, which was closed for renovation in 2011 and 2012. During this time we greatly strengthened our already strong relationship with SFSU by becoming an OLLI class there. In 2010 we added beautiful Mills College to our venue list, and this workshop will be our sixth time there. In 2011 we held our first-ever fundraising event, the Challenge Campaign, and raised almost $20,000 towards CMNC’s financial stability. We have Susan Wilson to thank both for finding Mills and for inspiring the Challenge Campaign. Our library has expanded thanks to Marion Taylor, and our Bylaws and Privacy Policy have been updated thanks to Lisa Lai. Our Workshop Planner software has been transferred to a new platform, and enriched with many helpful new features, thanks to Carolyn Lowenthal.

A look at our coach list shows a similar blending of old and new. In February1994 we enjoyed coaching from Alexander Quartet for the first time, and they will coach us again at San Francisco State in February 2015. At every workshop we have many of our old favorites (think Burke Schuchmann, who rivals Bob Nesbet in staying power) and several new people as well. In February 2013 we had a memorable set of coaches for our master classes: the Juilliard String Quartet. Joseph Lin, Ronald Copes, Samuel Rhodes and Joel Krosnick each coached six groups of string and piano participants, while our own wonderful coaches gave a master class for the wind groups. It was an unforgettable weekend. So many wonderful musicians have helped us at our workshops over the years; please know that we appreciate all of you. The gift you coaches share, of finding and nurturing the music in our souls, is beyond any value and we are grateful to you always.

Music, friends, amazing experiences, and community: this is why I keep CMNC so near the center of my life. We plan to celebrate our anniversary at Mills with better wine than usual, and here in advance is my toast: all gratitude to our founders, Alex Zuckerman, David Gortner and Al Kaufman, to our hardworking board, to all the dedicated volunteers, to our esteemed coaches, and to every passionate participant. Here’s to the next 25 years, and our Golden Anniversary in 2039.

April 2014

Harriet Spiegel

While this Newsletter reaches you through the magic of computer technology, I must admit, as I write this, that I am nostalgic for my manual typewriter. It saw me through my dissertation eons ago, and we had a comfortable working partnership: there was a reassuring connection between the push of my fingers on the key, initiating a visible, physical process, and the printed result, the letter pressed into the page.

Like my manual typewriter, my violin allows me to connect measurable action to a physical result. The sound a typewriter produces, however, is incidental to its purpose, while the sound a musical instrument produces is its purpose. Yet I had given no more thought or appreciation to the making of my violin than I had to the construction of my Olivetti. Thus I was unexpectedly astonished and enraptured when I visited the Livermore shop of the man who made my violin, Alan Copeland, and saw how a lovely instrument began as two humble slabs of old wood. I had given even less thought to my bow---hey, it’s a stick of bent wood and some horse hair, how complicated can that be-- so my visit to John Greenwood’s studio in San Francisco, where he makes, repairs, and re-hairs bows, was an immensely rewarding experience.

I am using this opportunity as Guest Editor to encourage us to learn more about each other’s instruments as well as our own. I’ll start in this issue with a piece about bows; it is my hope that future newsletters will have articles about other musical instruments.

January 2014

Amy Apel

Some of my fondest memories are about observing people playing music at close range. Memories of my uncle’s bluegrass band from my childhood are very important in my musical history. I didn’t understand until much later, when I began playing chamber music myself, that my uncle’s band was my first exposure to making your own music at home. What we are doing when we play chamber music is essentially the same thing; we are actively making our own music, not consuming music made by others.

When we closely observe music being made by someone else, we can gain some insight into what that person is thinking and feeling. When I was in high school I would stand behind my pianist friend as he played Chopin, and I felt as if I almost knew what it felt like to be him, at least at that moment. I remember mentioning this to another friend at the time, who thought that this was a very presumptuous and perhaps delusional thing to say. Thirty years later, I mentioned this to Cynthia Darby and Maria Reeves during lunch at a CMNC workshop, and Cynthia said something along the lines of, “Well, that person obviously wasn’t a musician!”

I have experienced this sensation in my life as an adult chamber musician as well. The essence of the musician becomes almost visible.

I get different things out of the experience depending on whether the person plays an instrument in the same family as mine or an entirely different instrument. One of the recent experiences I had with this was at the Opus 8 concert (in which many CMNC members performed). I was practically sitting in the tuba player’s lap. Now, I play the viola, and I know very little about brass instruments, so it was really interesting to see how a person playing such a large instrument anticipates what to do next. In order to get the instrument to “speak” at the right time, he had to begin playing ahead of the beat. It was especially fun to watch him take in a huge tank of air and to practically feel his diaphragm and other muscles working to push the air through the instrument.

Another time I had this experience was when I turned pages for the pianist in a performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. This pianist had made very few markings, so it was interesting to see the ones she had made. One of the movements is written in unison for all four instruments, with very tricky rhythms. In one place, the pianist’s markings counted out small beats within a passage, 1-2-3-4-5. She didn’t use slashes or count out the beats (1 + 2 + 3 +) as many of us might have done. Her numbers simply indicated that the duration of a note was 5 subdivisions long. In another movement, the pianist’s body became very quiet and reverent as the music shimmered with what the synesthetic Messiaen referred to as “blue-orange chords”.

To set the stage for a similar experience, you must be looking over the musician’s shoulder as they are playing. You must be able to see both the music and the movements the person is making. And of course you have to listen to the sounds they produce. This only works when you are positioned behind the player. I believe that this is because it is as close as you can possibly get to that person's visual perspective; you are almost seeing through their eyes. Once you are in this position, you may be become aware of the alchemy through which the notes written by the composer are turned into musical gold by a living person. As you stand behind a musician playing their instrument, you can see how their emotional, mental and physical processes are functioning together to produce audible music.

Mental processes

• How does the player interpret the information written on the page? Is the person able take in all of this written information? If not, what do they leave out? Did they still retain the essence of the musical ideas?
• How do they get set up to shift positions? What fingerings do they use?
• How fast is the person playing? How do they seem to be subdividing the pulse in their mind?
• If they get off track, how were they able to get back in?
• What kind of markings has the person made in their part?
• How does the player navigate tempo changes?

Physical processes -- How are the player’s mental processes translated into action?

• Does the attitude of the person’s body reflect the sound they are producing?
• What kind of pulse do they seem to be feeling in their body?
• What articulation is the person using?
• How do they bodily anticipate what is coming up next? For strings, how do they place their left hand? What part of the bow are they set to use? How are the bow hand and arm set for the articulation?
• What stylistic effect does the player’s shifting, vibrato and use of bow create?
• How are wind players managing their breath?
• Where is the musician looking? Are they buried in the music, or are they checking in visually with other group members? Are they watching other group members for cues?
• If they are looking at the music, how far ahead are they looking? (It may be easiest to observe this at page turns.)
• Are they giving cues to the group? Is the player breathing in unison with others in the group at strategic places?

Emotional processes

• How did the composer feel when he or she wrote this music?
• How does this music seem to make the player feel?

Playing music is a very intimate thing, as you are revealing yourself through your playing. This intimacy is, at the same time, one of the most satisfying and the most terrifying things about performing chamber music. It can be deeply rewarding to “see” others in this intimate way and to feel “seen” yourself.

I hope that some of you will ask some of these questions the next time you have the privilege of eavesdropping on another musician’s process and getting to know someone in a new way.

August 2013

Ray Van Diest

Though amateur musicians engage in musical discipline for pleasure, we seem motivated to advance as expressive and engaging performers. Wider acquaintance with chamber music literature and social engagement with people in similar pursuits are obvious benefits. Otherwise, why submit to the experience of CMNC weekend workshops and anxieties of performance? Thus, we become lifelong learners whose ultimate goal is to stay lively, engaged, and joyful. It is daunting to contemplate or concentrate, with help from coaches, on myriad building agendas of technique, posture, breathing, style, thoughts, expressive emotions, motivation, language, interpretation, drama, history, philosophy, and an infinite raft of relevant and nuanced other considerations.

In his book Chronicles of Tao, Deng Ming-Dao puts the idea thus: “A beautiful accomplishment takes a long time, ultimately involving lifelong consideration.” Added wisdom saved, of all places, from a fortune cookie: “Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.” Overheard from a wag at a CMNC luncheon table: “After all, the skillset for learning to play an instrument is finite, yes?” (Perhaps, yet learning to play an instrument is but the first step on the way to knowledge of chamber music.)

In light of the first two quotes, the final observation is open to discussion and disagreement. Learning to play an instrument is not the same as learning about the finite but, in terms of a poignantly brief human lifespan, the infinite and expanding universe of chamber music. We live mere moments, compared to the durability of music and of cosmic planetary eons. Perhaps our species is a momentary phenomenon, too. The human experiment seems blindly bent upon snuffing our kind out sometimes. Not to wax too dismal, though–CMNC is an enjoyable antidote to such dark considerations.

In this issue of the newsletter, we present information about past and upcoming workshops, bits of humor, personal reflections, exhortations, and pictures from the last workshop. Being an interim editor is a humbling task, the more so as one considers the masterful, knowledgeable previous editors’ efforts. Gentle reader, please exercise forbearance and pity for this humbled scrivener, and indeed, for all contributors to this issue of The Chamber Musician. We submit ourselves for your consideration with a heart for our common purpose: to learn about and to perform beautiful, interesting chamber music! As much as any aesthetic endeavor, chamber music seems an adventure of Spirit.

April 2013

Elizabeth Morrison

It was easy to see during the Juilliard String Quartet’s visit to our workshop in February that memories of their concerts glow warmly in many hearts. Throughout the weekend I saw people approach one player or the other and try to express what the quartet has meant to them over the years.

The graciousness of their response suggested that they understand how important such interactions are in their profound relationship with us, their audience. At one point I heard Steve Alter telling Joel Krosnick about a recital he had attended at UCLA in the 70’s, when Steve felt he had understood the fugue in Beethoven’s last cello sonata for the first time. As the two stood talking I could swear that Mr. Krosnick was genuinely trying to remember the occasion. There was a sweet feeling to the encounter, no hint of a celebrity responding from on high, just of one dedicated cellist to another.

The path to that moment and to the whole amazing weekend was, as you may have heard, anything but smooth. In fact, one week before the workshop there was doubt that it would happen at all. I am going to recount the events here, partly to put it into CMNC’s memory store but mostly to thank those who helped us pull it off in the end. It’s just a few paragraphs, and we’ll get back to more wonderful moments soon.

When Richard Festinger, the Artistic Director of the Morrison Artist Series, said that the Juilliard would be playing in the series in February and suggested that CMNC invite them to give master classes at our workshop, we were both excited and worried. We weren’t worried by the eminence of the quartet; that was purely exhilarating, and anyway we are used to having amazing coaches at CMNC. Our worries were organizational and, actually, philosophical. After so many years of putting on workshops we rely on a set of well-oiled procedures, and we’d never before tried to hold master classes with just four coaches.

More fundamentally, we were concerned that we not divide the workshop into “Juilliard” and “Non-Juilliard” tracks. That is just not what CMNC is about, and we only wanted to do it if everyone could take part in a Juilliard master class. But how could it be done? We recalled a workshop at San Francisco State in which, due to a shortage of rooms, we’d had to shoehorn an entire workshop into twenty groups and five master classes. It was tight but it worked. This time, if we expanded the master class time to two hours, we could have twenty-four groups, six groups in each master class, with each group coached for about twenty minutes. That seemed possible, so we went ahead.

Then the applications started to come in. We found that over 200 people had applied, compared to our usual 150-160. Fitting all the Saturday applicants into 24 groups was out of the question. So we sent a message to the Juilliard and obtained their agreement (so we thought) to expand the time they would spend with us to three hours, and to coach up to eight groups each. We managed in the end to create 28 workable groups, seven for each master class, and were feeling reasonably settled when we learned, a week before the workshop, that the Juilliard had only just been told what they were in for. The three hours was fine, but they had apparently been picturing a more leisurely sort of event, one where a few advanced string quartets would play entire movements and receive the benefit of extensive coaching. We had of course accepted far too many people for this to be remotely possible, nor could we bear to tear the fabric of our community by selecting a favored few.

It was a tense few days, resolved by the kindly help of the wonderful Alexander Quartet and their visiting friend, violist Toby Appel. Toby, whose aunt Carrie Schoenbach happened to be attending the workshop, contacted the Juilliard and somehow got them to realize that spending three hours coaching untold numbers of amateurs was the opportunity they’d been waiting for all their lives. Thank you, Toby!

But we were still not quite there. The most the Juilliard felt they could do justice to in three hours was six groups each. We couldn’t imagine how we could cut four groups out of our number until Susan Kates, the leader of the winds on our Board, said that rather than having everyone miss this opportunity, we should take the five all-woodwind groups out of the Juilliard classes and give them their own separate master class. It was an extremely generous act and it did make it possible for us to go ahead. All gratitude goes to Susan, to the wind groups for their gracious acceptance of this arrangement, and to our three excellent wind coaches, Scott Hartman, Yael Ronen and Margaret Thornhill, who gave by all accounts a wonderful master class to the wind groups.

At last, and yes it was just two days before the workshop, we finally knew that our Juilliard weekend was going to happen. We had nothing to worry about beyond a few last minute cancellations and a flood in the Creative Arts building, a comparatively minor catastrophe. On Friday I went over to San Francisco State to watch the quartet give master classes to young groups from the university, and heard coaching by Joel Krosnick and Samuel Rhodes. I relaxed even more as I saw they were not only superlative musicians but also thoughtful, engaged teachers. We were good to go, and it was going to be incredible.

January 2013

Elizabeth Morrison

At our last meeting we reluctantly accepted that Susan Wilson was really resigning from the CMNC Board after four amazing years. She had been doing so many different tasks, and doing them so well, that we could hardly imagine a workshop without her. Her gift from the beginning was seeing where we needed help, then diving in to make sure that we got it.

She brought her expertise as a graphic designer to this newsletter, the Membership Directory, our workshop programs, the coach concert programs, the workshop signage, and indeed everything we print. It is due to her that they all now look so stylish and professional. If you happen to remember what this newsletter looked like when I put it together amateurishly in Word, you can see how much she has improved things. Her energy went into concepts as well as design. From her first days on the board she was a strong voice for the creation of the CMNC Operations Manual, which is now a mainstay for all of us.

Another area where Susan showed her creativity was in extending the reach of volunteers. She created the job of Volunteer Coordinator because she understood how much better our organization would be if the many people who wanted to help with the workshops had a clear path to do so, and brought so many volunteers in so productively at every workshop that we now can’t imagine how we ever did without them.

In her role as Facilities Coordinator, she searched tirelessly for new venues. This work paid off handsomely when she found Mills College, which has been a marvelously successful venue for our workshops for three years now. We will all continue to benefit from this achievement for many years.

At every venue she took tremendous responsibility for the success of the workshop, working behind the scenes long before the weekends themselves. Then, when the actual workshop weekend arrived, those of us who glimpsed her activity would be simply amazed. If you arrived early enough you would see her on Saturday mornings making sure the registration table was in order, setting out water bottles, organizing the freelancing table, bringing in the wine (!) and so much more. She also handled the registration materials, including the workshop programs and the nametags, with help from volunteers. Even the signs that would appear as if by magic at each venue, pointing us to hard-to-find rooms or the elusive dining hall, were her doing. It is taking three people to replace her in the role of Facilities Coordinator alone.

Last year, in addition to everything else, she created and led our first-ever fundraising drive, the CMNC Challenge. If she had done nothing else we would all have been so grateful to her, but of course it was just one of the countless ways she contributed to the strength and vitality CMNC. From my own heart, I want to say what a pleasure it has been to have Susan on the board. She is a lively presence, and has a sure inner compass for what is best for us as a community. We will miss her at the meetings, but know we’ll see her at our workshops as always. Susan, from all of us, thank you for all you’ve done.

August 2012

Elizabeth Morrison

Every summer, after what feels like the best Humboldt ever, I ponder what it is that makes this chamber music workshop essential. I love workshops, and have enjoyed every one I’ve been lucky enough to attend, but the heart of my summer, the still point in a turning world, is always Humboldt.

Part of it has to be the place. After the hot drive up through the Ukiah Valley and across the Russian River watershed, the first glimpse of Humboldt Bay as you coast down the hill from Fortuna comes like a long exhale of relief and gratitude. It’s still there! Then there are the beautiful redwood trees, alive with nature spirits. I always feel them gathering above the hall to hear us play. The trees, the water and the cool moist air are delights in themselves, but they’re background to the real joy of the workshop: the way we arrive, excited as kids at camp, to play and play and then, when we’re completely exhausted, to freelance.

That’s what brings us back, so many of us, year after year. I save my programs, and I’m looking now at the ones from my first Humboldt, Week 3 of 1986, to see if anyone else from back then showed up this summer, 26 years farther down the road. Sure enough, I see four people, two couples as it happens: Alan and Barbara Mullens Geier, not yet risen to their current eminence, Joselyn Bartlett, still living in Santa Barbara, and Tony Miksak, already in Mendocino. The programs from1987 give me seven more: Adrienne Casco and Molly Banks, both of whom I played with this year, Leo Kadehjian, Susan Breitbard, Joe Beck, Jonathan Lehan and Todd Wetherwax. On the 1986 week 1 list I spot Al Kaufman, one of the founders of CMNC, and in 1987 there are the other two, Alex Zuckerman and David Gortner. Dave was there this year, back after a long hiatus. Also in 1986 there's Bob Nesbet, the only original CMNC Director still on the Board. He and I played together in the eight-cello Bachianas Brasileiras on August 1, 1986, with Patti Hollenbeck singing. Do you remember it, Bob?

Like the trees and the water, the workshop is always the same, and always fresh and new. This year we played in Van Duzer Theater instead of Fulkerson Hall, which actually we liked, while the rituals of the board and coffee and photo-on-the-steps remained reassuringly in place. I played some music for the first time, including a sextet by Gustav Erlanger, a composer so obscure he is not even in German Wikipedia; had a chance to up my appreciation quota for Hindemith; worked out a segment of the Mendelssohn octet with a gang of old hands and a couple of newbies; was given a longed-for shot at the Debussy quartet; and finished up the week searching for, and finding, emotional depth in a three-minute movement for bassoon and strings by Bernard Garfield. What could possibly be more fun? When you add in not having to cook for a week and the opportunity to watch dignified older adults make fools of themselves over soft-serve ice cream, you have about as much joy as one heart can hold.

My old friend Ken Love, who lives in Arcata but has never attended a workshop, finally gave in and joined us this year, and after a few days he confessed how thrilling he found it to check the board each morning to see what the day would hold. “Like Christmas,” he said, and it’s true. “And if you mess up on the stage today, tomorrow’s another day,” he added. Right again. “I’m addicted,” Cheri Gans noted, while urging us to join her in McCall, Idaho in August. Same here; also obsessed, enthralled, entranced, enraptured and embraced. You know, I think we all are.

April 2012

Elizabeth Morrison

One of my favorite moments at a CMNC workshop, at least of those I spend away from my cello, comes when I walk into the dining room on Saturday evening and hear the lively buzz of a roomful of chamber players talking about their musical day. The quality of the buzz is the way I evaluate Saturday, and most times it truly lifts my heart. Another kind of process begins soon after the Sunday session, when the online evaluation forms begin to hit our inboxes. What a window onto the workshop they are! So many of you send them in–at the last workshop we had 117 evaluations from 154 participants, which is more than 75% -–that we really do get a sense of how our long-pondered arrangements have actually played out in real life.

It’s great that so many of the responses go beyond simple yes and no answers. There’s no limit on how much you can write on the form, and some of you write a lot. I attribute this to blogging, which nurtures a habit of self-expression that is clearly triggered when by the feel of a keyboard under the fingers. You freely share your thoughts and feelings about the music, the groups, the coaches, and of course the facilities and food. You might be surprised to see how seriously we take critical comments. After each workshop we spend time discussing all the comments suggesting ways we can do better. With facilities and food there is often nothing we can do; so much of that is simply out of our control, though we do keep trying. In other areas we can have more impact, and often we sense that a question or concern raised by one or two participants may be others’ minds as well.

For example, we were asked why Sunday’s optional performance sampler is split into several rooms, rather than combined into one room so that we could hear all the groups who are playing. That’s an easy one: it’s because we need to get the library packed up and in general get out of the venue by about 5 on Sunday, so we need the performances not to run too long.

Another question is why it occasionally happens that wind groups are coached by string coaches and vice versa. As coach coordinator, that’s my bad, if it’s actually bad. I need to line up the coaches well in advance of each workshop, and don’t always guess right about the proportion of wind and string groups we will end up with. Our coaches are all such good musicians that we feel they will be able to offer musical, if not technical, advice even to players outside of their instrument group; but I agree that ideally the coach’s instrument should match the group’s. And sometimes the perspective of a different kind of coach is surprisingly valuable.

Yet another question concerned the difficulty of using the library catalogue to find music for freelancing. We are looking into how we can improve the format, and hope to have it fixed soon, if it can be fixed in the Filemaker program we are using. If we need to switch to another platform it may take longer, but we are definitely on this one.

Another question is why your favorite wind coach was not at this workshop. The answer to this one is that the wind coaches are rotated more than the string ones. At a typical workshop we might have 12 to 14 coaches, of which three or four will be wind coaches, one or two will be pianists, and the rest will be strings. To give the wind players variety in their coaches, we need to change them more often than we do the string coaches. Since there are more string coaches, we get variety even with the same people present, and we tend to invite a much-appreciated pantheon to workshop after workshop. Piano coaches need to be very versatile, as they may be coaching piano/string or piano/wind groups. With only one piano player per group, it often happens that piano groups are coached by someone from the wind or string side, so it is not often that we have an opening for a piano coach. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to match groups with coaches, and I very much welcome your feedback.

We have also used the evaluation forms to get answers to our own questions about how to make the workshops fit your needs and desires. A good example is the survey we did a few years back on whether you liked coaching on both days or on Saturday, with an uncoached reading day on Sunday. We learned that the majority prefer coaching both days, but there is a significant minority who enjoy the reading day, which is why we settled on our current practice of having one uncoached Sunday each year. We also recently added an evaluation item asking if you had gems from your coaching you’d like to pass along. We love reading these, and as a matter of fact the article in this issue from Pete Nowlen was directly inspired from one of these entries.

Of course, we love most of all reading about your pleasure and happiness. Miriam Blatt, who as Evaluations Coordinator spends a great deal of time compiling the comments for the rest of the board, always leads off her report with what she calls “Some positive words to start.” Out of many delightful comments, our favorite this time came from Myrna Westover, who has given me permission to use her comment here. She wrote, “I do not believe I have ever had a more thoroughly enjoyable day in my whole life. A wonderful piece of music and good people to work with–who really wanted to do more than just the famous first movement–and a fine coach.” It’s comments like this that keep us going through the sometimes stressful process of putting on a workshop, and if it weren’t for the evaluations, we would have never known! Thanks Myrna, and thanks everyone for your thoughtful evaluations. I’d say “keep them coming” but I know you will!

January 2012

Elizabeth Morrison

My red-letter thanksgiving this holiday season is for the friends I’ve made through chamber music. Thirteen years ago, when I decided to move to the Bay area, I came up with the idea of driving down from Eureka to take part in CMNC workshops, in hopes of meeting people to play with when we actually made the move. Well, it worked! CMNC turned out to be a warmly welcoming community, and by the time we were established in temporary quarters in Redwood City we already had a quartet with whom we play regularly to this day. I joined the CMNC Board, one thing led to another, and now CMNC workshops and friends are very close to the center of my life.

I was thinking about this when contemplating the wonderful outpouring of support for CMNC that came from this fall’s CMNC Challenge. This was our first-ever fundraising drive, and its success tells me that many, many people treasure CMNC as I do. You may recall that the Challenge was announced in the last issue of The Chamber Musician, where we set a goal of raising $10,000 by the end of the year. We began by forming a Challenge Committee of people donating $500 or more, to start the drive with the first half of that goal. The Challenge Committee responded with $7000, so we mentally raised the goal to $14,000, although we would still have been happy with $10,000. Most of the fundraising was done at the October 2011 Mills Workshop, but donations came in through the website as well, and in fact are still coming in (the drive formally ends on December 31, 2011.)

The Challenge was created and led by Susan Wilson, who saw the need for action and didn’t wait for someone else to do it. She designed the campaign, created the mailout postcard and the poster-thermometer for the workshop, made calls, and was a major donor herself. I couldn’t be more grateful to her for her energy, creativity and insight.

I thought you might like to know something more about the response. First, the total raised as of December 4, 2011 is $17,380. We are amazed. Sheri Schultz, our treasurer, called this a “bountiful blessing” for CMNC, and so it is, especially in these difficult economic times. Ninety-three people, in addition to the original ten of the Challenge Committee, gave donations. There were three donations of $500 in this group, one of $450 and one of $400, two of $300, many of $250 and $200. The average gift is over $100. Thank you all so much. I am going into this detail partly because we made the decision not to break out the donor list into categories like $100–$199, and so on. We are extremely grateful for the generosity of the large donors, and we so much appreciate donations of any size, so we felt that listing all donors alphabetically best expressed that feeling.

A few people asked me, when we announced the drive, whether CMNC was in financial trouble. The answer is no, we were not in any danger of going away. We have managed our funds carefully, paid all our bills for each workshop as we go, and with the additional help of a grant from ACMP for which we are very thankful, we could have continued to do so. But as we said during the drive, our worries were that we would have to continue raising fees to cover expense, making it impossible for some people to attend; we would not be able to continue to offer financial aid where needed; we did not have funds to rescue our somewhat ailing website; and we did not have a financial cushion for unexpected emergencies. Now, thanks to our members, these are no longer worries. We will continue our careful management and do not plan another fundraising drive for at least five more years. Once again, thank you, everyone.

August 2011

Elizabeth Morrison

It was another summer of delightful chamber music workshops–Humboldt and Ashland for me, while other friends headed for CalCap in Sacramento, San Diego in Claremont, and Jana Jae’s chamber-music-and fiddle-fest in McCall, Idaho. Maria Reeves blazed a new trail by attending a Summer Arts workshop called International Chamber Music and the Third Stream, with the Alexander String Quartet. I’d like to try that next year. We are lucky to have so many opportunities to play, learn and connect.

I was assigned quite a few unusual pieces this summer, which made me marvel yet again at the enormous amount of music our workshops possess. Humboldt’s collection has three different libraries, two belonging to the workshop and one that is part of Humboldt State University, all with huge holdings. Ashland’s chamber music library, I was told, is the largest west of the Mississippi, and Hans Hoffer claimed last year that neither Humboldt’s nor Ashland’s is as big as CalCap’s. Even allowing for competitive exaggeration, this is deep. I couldn’t help recalling the Manhattan String Quartet workshop in Salzburg last January, where the Lais, the Morrisons and the Miksaks all vied to play one evening from a single book of Mozart quartets, literally the only piece of music there.

Even more impressive than the libraries is the creative way the directors rummage through them for our edification and pleasure. Over my ten workshop days I was given pieces by Frank Martin, Johann Quantz, John Ireland, Benjamin Britten, Jennifer Higdon and Richard Strauss, and heard (among many others) works by Zemlinsky, Andriessen, de Wailley, Garfield, Bargiel, and a veritable festival of Madeleine Dring. Then I got to conclude both my workshops with a Friday assignment of Beethoven. How cool is that! These experiences, and the precious friendships that come out of them, are what keep me going back summer after summer.

March 2011

Elizabeth Morrison

This winter I was lucky enough to attend two workshops: first the Manhattan String Quartet’s week in Salzburg in January, then our own CMNC weekend at San Francisco State in February. The Salzburg workshop was all about Mozart’s String Quartet K575, and since K575 was the quartet Ralph and I played in Paris on our honeymoon, and just happens to be my car’s license plate, I certainly couldn’t miss that one.

As it turned out, Salzburg was almost CMNC East. Eight CMNC members participated, and two spouses kept us company while enjoying Salzburg probably more than we did. The CMNC contingent included Carolyn Lowenthal, workshop director for San Francisco State, and Tony Miksak, who sent us his amused commentary on the way the Manhattan members and Prague cellist Evzen Rattay perplexed us with their wildly differing takes on the same music. The issue interested me too, and I have to say that as much as I like and admire Mr. Rattay, I come down squarely with the Manhattan on the matter of upbows in the first three measures of the Menuetto.

The amazing part about being in Salzburg was getting to see actual Mozart stuff, not just his surprisingly spacious kitchen but his letters and manuscripts. My takeaway was how inventively he played with, twisted and subverted classical forms. It seems to me highly likely that there would be no accent on any beat of the opening measures until you get to the off-kilter sforzando in bar four, which in turn makes all the upbows just perfect. I agreed with all the offbeat accents in the fourth movement too, though Mr. Rattay found them strange and unmusical. They are odd, indeed. But then, I like odd.

Then it was back in the Bay Area just in time for Carolyn to put the finishing touches on the San Francisco State workshop. After the Salzburg scene of just12 groups, all of us intent on a single Mozart quartet, it was thrilling to walk into CA 153 at SF State and see more than a hundred people happily preparing to work on 27 different pieces, from a Franz Schmidt Quintet for clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano to a Vaclav Masek wind dectet. I love our noisy hubbub, our diversity, and above all our coaches. The Manhattan Quartet members are fine and experienced, but our coaches are beyond awesome. East, west, home’s best.

January 2011

Elizabeth Morrison

I have been a CMNC Board member for eleven years, and vice president since 2003, having been elected behind my back at a meeting I didn’t even attend. But being VP was easy, with Bob Goldstein doing the heavy lifting of leadership. Becoming president, as I did in June of this year, is something else. When I realized the task would be falling to me, I stopped and took stock. I’d participated in most of the tasks of putting on a workshop. That, I knew how to do. What I didn’t know was how to be president of a nonprofit corporation. Besides buying a copy of Nonprofit Law and Governance for Dummies, what should I do?

The answer was perfectly clear: I should turn to Lisa Lai. Lisa is a good friend, a valued chamber music partner, and a lawyer with deep experience with nonprofits. I agreed to take on the presidency only when she consented to come onto the Board. She joined us in September 2009, and was elected Corporate Secretary in June 2010.

She told me from the start that she was not joining the Board to be CMNC’s lawyer. But she saw immediately that our legal foundation needed attention. The CMNC Bylaws were completely out of date. They had been tinkered with a bit over the years, but were essentially the same ones we’d had for twenty years, despite many changes to California law. Lisa began there, and in the past year she has done all this and more: updated the Bylaws; created a Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for our web site (you can see a link to it on the home page and on every page where information is asked for); created templates for Service Agreements, Coach Agreements, minutes, agendas, resolutions and certificates; written the legal portion of the CMNC Board Manual; and submitted a successful ACMP grant application. She also helped me negotiate the start of an excellent new relationship with San Francisco State, and spent an amazing amount of time educating me about nonprofit law and governance.

Clearly, however, she was acting as CMNC’s lawyer, simply because that was the need she saw. This was truly not fair to her, and in October we reluctantly accepted her resignation so that she could become our legal advisor in a more structured way. She says I’ll be fine on my own, and I hope that’s true. At least I know that thanks to her work, our ship is well fitted for the next years of our voyage together. I wanted you all to know that, and to express my gratitude for Lisa’s help to me personally, and to all of us in CMNC.

August 2010

Elizabeth Morrison

For my summer workshops this year I did Humboldt (surprise, only my 23rd time) and Ashland, where I haven’t been since 2004. They were both wonderful, each in its own way. Humboldt surrounds us with familiar bliss. The redwood trees were just as they always are, a tiny fraction of their size bigger, an even smaller fraction of their long, long lives older, than when we saw them last. These beautiful trees are (for me at least) angels who hear our music each year. Walking in the Arcata Forest you feel them everywhere-kami, Lisa Lai murmured, and so they are.

The Humboldt programs show Terrie Baune’s virtuoso touch, and each day’s concert was packed with interesting new pieces. Yes, the programs are long, and in the past I’ve thought of them almost as a spiritual practice, where we can learn to listen, not to the notes but to the music. But for some reason the notes seemed somehow better too. The programs have been improving for some time now, but this year you simply couldn’t miss how easy it was to enjoy them simply as concerts: good music, well played.

Then on to Ashland. I have to say that it is not the cozy communal experience Humboldt is. This can be laid mainly at the door of the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, where you can go out to a play every evening and hardly freelance at all. Many people do. The living arrangements are part of it too: lunch is not included in the meal plan, dinner is crowded and has no big communal tables like the ones at Humboldt State, and a lot of folks stay off campus; so many bonding opportunities are lost.

On the other hand, the Ashland programs have their own special character, and often mix longed-for standards with unusual pieces. This year, for example, I got to play a piece written by Max Bruch at the age of 11 (!) with almost the same instrumentation as the Beethoven Septet. The Bruch was fun, and when the second violin switched to viola, we could do the Beethoven as well, which was thrilling for all of us. I also met a bunch of people for the first time, which rarely happens at Humboldt. I’ll just mention a few names: Fred Johnson, George Goldberg, Bill Breneau, Rob Ronald, Ron Relic, Kathryn Barnard–I could go on and on. If you run into any of these people grab them immediately and freelance with them.

Ashland is hotter days and shorter concerts, less living in each other’s pockets morning, noon and night, no second bows, but a tremendous focus on the music while we were there, and above all splendid coaching. And just as at Humboldt, the programs were truly enjoyable. All this came into focus during a conversation I had with Tom Stauffer at the party on Friday. He said that during the quarter century he’s been coaching at our workshops he has seen us grow into a cohort of knowledgeable, skillful amateurs with a real understanding of chamber music. There are times, he went on, when he just wants to sit and listen to us! Isn’t that amazing? I could have sworn he was sincere. I felt so grateful to be part of this family, profoundly thankful to those who created and maintain the summer workshops¬. At Humboldt it is the Phillips family, Val, Gerre, Meredith and now Tom, along with Alan Geier and Terrie Baune. At Ashland it is Phebe Kimball and Rhett Bender, at Chico Al Loeffler and Pete Nowlen, at San Diego Ron and Winona Goldman¬. These dedicated people have nourished and formed us. I am proud of CMNC for keeping us playing between summers, and proud of us all for our commitment to chamber music. We know we’re not professionals. We aren’t paid for what we do. But with who knows what courage in the face of our many limitations, we do it! And year after year, what we receive is beyond all measure.

April 2010

Elizabeth Morrison

Being on the CMNC Board with Bob Goldstein and Susan Kates as has been a big part of my life for the last decade. I never imagined it would change, but it is changing¬; as of June 30, 2010, Bob is retiring after nine years as Board President, and Susan after more than ten years as Recording Secretary. They will still remain as Board members, thank heavens–we couldn’t possibly do without them.

I first met them in 1988, when I switched to Humboldt Week II and there they were. The group picture from that week shows Susan looking like a teenager (actually, she still does) and Bob standing near her, very handsome, with black hair and just a little gray in his beard. I love that picture: there’s Ralph, whom I met that very day; there’s Richard and Mildred Been; there’s an incredibly young Val Phillips; there are so many dear friends who have died but live in our memories, so many who became and remain essential friends.

Although I was a Week II person for seven years, I got to play with Bob only once. In the great Piston Divertimento, July 14, 1992, and Susan twice. In the Dvorak Serenade, on July 19, 1989 with Val Phillips on third horn, and most memorably, in the Martinu Serenade, on July 19, 1991, when we received coaching from Ed Harris that we both recall in detail to this day. I didn’t know them well, but they were stars. I wanted to know them and always maneuvered to get near them at the party. So when I was asked to join the CMNC Board in 2000, the chance to hang out with and get to know Bob and Susan was one of the things that decided me to accept.

Bob became President in soon afterwards, in early 2001. I had almost no experience with the earlier, Alex Zuckerman-led Board, but many former members have told me that it was more like a startup, with diverging ideas about CMNC jostling, sometimes very forcibly, with one another. That changed remarkably when Bob took on the presidency. He has a leadership style that somehow makes us want to interact calmly and warmly with one another, and we do. He also has a knack of letting discussion go on as long as it remains productive, then somehow moving us towards a decision, just before we start restating our opinions more loudly. We actually look forward to our meetings, and it’s really not just because of our delicious Board lunches. Under Bob’s leadership, the Board has become, as he once said, a loyal and affectionate bunch, and we truly enjoy doing our work of musical community-building together.

Susan’s contribution has been equally amazing to me over the years. She has been a great Recording Secretary, of course, but she has also been (and will continue to be) an uncredited co-workshop director for winds on every single workshop. There is a lot of organizing to do for the wind players, due to the superabundance we always have of clarinets and flutes and the relative scarcity of oboes, horns and, especially, bassoons. Susan manages to both waitlist and recruit in a fair and even-handed way. She then forms the winds into balanced groups, comes up with interesting and challenging assignments, and makes it all look easy. We even have a saying we often repeat while we are busy going laboriously over the pesky string assignments: “At least the winds are perfect.”

The two of them have been a remarkable presence, and will be a very hard act to follow. The entry Bob wrote on the job of president for the CMNC Board Manual gives a valuable clue to how they stayed so focused for so long. After describing the president’s duties, Bob writes,

“The president should demonstrate CMNC principles and ideals: musical seriousness, appreciation of variety in our membership and workshop rosters, fairness to participants and coaches, promoting the enjoyment as much as the study of chamber music, rewarding and applauding the efforts of Board members, and putting the good of CMNC ahead of personal advantage.”

And that is exactly what they have both done. Thank you so much from all of us.

September 2009

Elizabeth Morrison

My usual column in this space is 400 words and fits neatly on half a page. Not this one. For CMNC’s 20th anniversary issue I’ve expanded my narrative to the whole issue. We’re going to wander through twenty years of CMNC history, starting with our Founder’s Myth. A myth, of course, is not a mere made-up story, but a resonant tale, told many times, expressing the qualities we care about most in ourselves. Ours shows that CMNC was born from love of music, certainly, but also from love of chamber music workshops, those joyful celebrations we have placed so near the center of our lives.

The story of CMNC is the story of people who cared about community, and for that I would like to especially remember the founding president, Alex Zuckerman. I interviewed Alex in one of my first issues as editor and I have never forgotten talking to him about his amazing 12 years as the leader of CMNC. He told me then that his experience as a bicycle activist had taught him about how to go about getting things done. Today he is remembered in the Alex Zuckerman Bicycle/Pedestrian Path across the Bay Bridge, but CMNC is also his memorial, and I hope he would be proud of us.

The first CMNC workshops had four sessions, two Saturday and two Sunday. All four were uncoached or, as they preferred to call it, self-coached. There is much discussion of this in the newsletters. This is from a story about evaluations of the third workshop, held at San Jose City College in June 1989. “Many participants–62 percent–do not consider coaching necessarily appropriate in a short two-day workshop, or don’t care either way. Respondents also felt coaching would be too costly. One person said, ‘Use only if it is superior.’ Another was more blunt: ‘I hate coaches. What do they know?’”

Nevertheless, the October 1992 Hayward workshop tried the experiment of offering one day of coaching on Saturday. Katherine Bukstein reports that she and Bill Horne had been to the San Diego workshop and enjoyed the coaching with master class format used there. They soon got the board to agree to give it a try. Katherine took on the task of hiring coaches and found a stellar initial lineup: Terrie Baune, Alan Clarke, Colin Hampton, Edward Harris, Rae Ann Goldberg, Carol Kutsch, Roxanne Michaelian and Deborah Pittman.

Here are some comments from that workshop: “Coaching helped set a mood of thinking, listening and cooperation that added to the fun of playing together, and that carried over into the next day. Coaches were helpful and un-intimidating. It was good to be coached on a difficult piece without the stress of performance. It would have been helpful to know the assignments ahead of time so as to be better prepared.” These have a familiar ring, as do the criticisms: “Coaches were spread too thin. There wasn’t enough time to be effective. One coach said the group didn’t need much help. Another coached only the piano player.”

At the next coached workshop, February 1993 at College of Marin, a second innovation appears, the Coach Concert. The first performing group was the San Francisco Conservatory Quartet. Over the years there have been many wonderful groups at our workshops. Katherine’s careful records show that the Alexander Quartet played in 1994, the Stanford Woodwind Quintet in 1995, and Burke Schuchmann and Bill Horne in 1995. In 1996 Terrie Baune led a quartet in a performance of a Gwyneth Walker piece called Traveling Songs, which was commissioned by CMNC. Walker herself was present at the workshop. The Anacapa Quartet played in 1997, the Del Sol in 1998, the Felici Trio in 2001, the Sun Quartet in 2002, the Cypress Quartet in 2003. CMNC has kept relationships with so many of these coaches and groups over the years. Roxanne Michaelian was at our first coached workshop and also at the most recent one, College of Marin May 2009!

In 2001 we added the option of coming as a preformed group on the coached day. Some members enjoy this, but preformed groups have not taken over the workshop by any means. Most CMNC members seem to like the opportunity to meet new people and play new music. Another innovation came in October 2006, when we tried offering coaching on both days. The evaluations show that while a majority enjoys two days of coaching, a substantial minority misses the old self-coached Sundays. We have settled for now on having two days of coaching for all at one workshop a year, and self-coached days for all but preformed groups at the other workshops. Clearly this is an evolving aspect of CMNC, and your input is always welcome.

The Chamber Musician, CMNC’s thrice-yearly newsletter, has been part of our culture from the beginning. Editing it was my first responsibility when I joined the board in 2000. I was recruited by Rheta Goldberg when I was still living in Eureka, I believe because I had written a note after my first CMNC workshop saying how much I enjoyed it. I couldn’t do much to help from that distance, but they were looking for a new editor, so I volunteered. Rheta gave me a notebook with most of the past issues, all but Volume 1 Number 1. The archive has been an invaluable source for this anniversary issue.

The first editor I believe was Alex Zuckerman, although does not credit himself. The first credited editor was Adrienne Casco, beginning in 1991. The next editor was Bob Barton, who served from 1993 to 1998. Both he and Adrienne produced many wonderful issues. The job then passed to Pat Maximoff and Bob Nesbet (1998-99), Pat Maximoff and Susan Kates (1999-2000) and finally Sue Fowle, Bob Nesbet and Susan Kates for one issue, until I took it on in 2001. Tina Kun gave me a break by editing three issues in 2007-2008.

The format settled in quite early. Issues announce upcoming workshops, report on past ones, and feature articles of interest to chamber music nuts like us. Contributors write about music (“Playing Late Beethoven Quartets” by David Gortner, “Mozart and the Flute” by Bob Barton, numerous erudite articles on repertoire by Bill Horne). Musical pun articles are a staple (“Adagio fromaggio: to play in a slow and cheesy manner,” etc.) There are reports on other workshops and articles by coaches explaining how we can do better. New board members are welcomed, retiring ones are thanked. Discussions about balance in workshop groups, and whether people should ever be expected to play with those less skillful than themselves, never go away. Almost every issue remembers a beloved CMNC member who has died. After we lost Rheta Goldberg in 2006 the entire issue was dedicated to her. This was also our first color issue, as I wanted to include some beautiful color photos of Rheta.

Chamber music, and the challenges of playing it, do not change much from year to year, and I could easily publish an issue from the 90’s as today’s. You’d never know! Until its 2008 design update by Susan Wilson, they even looked the same, with a masthead sporting the logo designed by Maria Reeves. To prove my point here is a quotation from Winter 1990. “The first violinist (string quartet), clarinetist (clarinet quintet), flutist (woodwind quintet) or the pianist (piano trio, etc.) should be the primus inter pares and make most decisions democratically it is hoped, because he/she is the best musician in the group…. There is no room for ego psychosis for those of us who feel the need to be soloists. We play music for the love of it. For that reason alone, it would be gracious that you let the leader lead and not lecture everybody on how to do it, simply because you may play the cello and think you are better than everybody else.” Sound familiar?

I like working on the newsletter and hope to continue as editor for as long as you will have me. One last point: this issue might be the last issue we send you on paper. To save money and the environment, we will be digital and paperless from now on.